November 2012 Archives

Birds twitter and chirp, as a bell begins to toll, no doubt from the chapel you are gazing upon in the distance, just past a wire fence and a large pine tree. A distant sound comes closer. Passes. You are lying on your stomach in the grass. Listening.

This is Room 2 at the Ecomusicology Listening Room (ELR), a collection of sounds and songs accompanying different visual cues, which was funded by an IonE mini grant. The ELR began as an exhibit displayed in New Orleans in early November at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Association (AMS), Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and Society for Music Theory (SMT), but now has an online home where visitors can listen to the soundscapes and gaze upon the images.

IonE Fellow and ELR director Mark Pedelty says that the compositions are "designed to inspire reflection, questions and new ideas concerning the relationship between music, image, sustainability and place."

The opening of the American Museum of Natural History's new exhibition, Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, this Saturday (Nov. 17) comes at an interesting time. 

The exhibit, which will look at food production throughout history and address the challenge we currently face of feeding an ever-growing population without destroying the planet as we do so, comes just days before Thanksgiving, the nation's holiday most focused on food as celebratory act. Obviously, as this is an annual holiday, the exhibition planners no doubt planned the opening with Thanksgiving in mind. The second reason the timing is interesting, though, is due to an event that no one could have anticipated well in advance. The AMNH is located in New York City, which, along with other areas of the East Coast, is still recovering from Hurricane Sandy. In recognition of these dichotomous events, Ellen V. Futter, president of the AMNH, said in a press release, "As the Museum prepares to open this comprehensive exhibition on the subject of food, we find ourselves disquietingly poised between the extremes of Hurricane Sandy--with its extensive devastation, including disruption to the food supply--and...Thanksgiving. In such a timely and vivid context, the Museum presents Our Global Kitchen, which addresses the vital and complex topic of food from the perspectives of the environment, food supply, and human culture."

What do you get when you mix more than 1,000 students, faculty, campus sustainability managers and others with three days' worth of interaction around sustainability issues? One inspiring conference - and, ultimately, a more sustainable campus and a more sustainable world. That was the goal of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) for its annual meeting in Los Angeles last month. Among the inspired - and inspiring -  were nearly a dozen individuals representing the University of Minnesota.

University of Minnesota presenters included, from the Twin Cities, undergraduate students Christy Newell and Eric Sannerud, sustainability education coordinator Beth Mercer-Taylor, sustainability director Amy Short, sustainability coordinator Shane Stennes, alternative transportation manager Steve Sanders and graduate alumna Elizabeth Turner. From Duluth, presenters included sustainability coordinator Mindy Granley sustainability associate Bryan French and graduate student Brian Bluhm.

Mercer-Taylor had these thoughts to share in the wake of the event:

BY ELIZABETH TURNER

In mid-October, over 1,700 students, faculty and staff from institutions of higher education across the United States and 20 countries around the world gathered in Los Angeles for the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

BY BEN LAUER

One fact that should be widely known to residents of the Twin Cities Metro area is that their city is home to some of the most widely available alternative forms of transportation in the nation. Ingrid Schneider's recent Frontiers in the Environment presentation, "Toward Active Transport in Minnesota: Insight & Ideas From a Statewide Survey," provided plenty of important insight into the motivations behind active transport.